Dec 28
Missing you…
Dear Blog,
I know that I said I wouldn’t write until after New Year but the days seem to be getting longer. I don’t think I realised how much I would miss you, even though it was I who went away.
A lot has been happening, and I’ve been keeping myself busy. I’ve found other rewarding ways to occupy my time. There have been some awful days and some wonderful days and some dreary, nothing days in between. It’s not that I feel the need to tell you all about them: I have never been a good diarist and my thoughts have always taken priority over the events of my life. But I miss the anchor you provide, that space at the end of the day when my time is yours alone.
On the days when I feel like I have achieved nothing, when I have no motivation at all, I force myself to take care of you and it overrides the purposelessness of all those hours which came before. On the days when I am overflowing with ideas, or words, or pains, or joys, you give me a place to pour them out yet hold them safe.
Often my life lacks a sense of reality. I am not a grounded person. It seems odd that you, living such an abstract existence, are the thing which keeps me earthed. I thought you would be the place where I would take off on those flights of fancy I miss so much. I was wrong about that.
I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.
I’ve worried about the shape you take, I’ve worried about the face you present to the world. I’ve worried about your lack of coherence. Sometimes, I haven’t even liked you.
It turns out that you are not a mirror held up to show me who I am. Just like a person, you are a hall of mirrors. I cannot make you whole and make you Truth. I cannot choose which reflection I will look at: I may see from the corner of my eye something that holds meaning, or something unrecognisable. I cannot choose what others will see reflected. Some aspect of light may catch them, or they may move on.
So you will be what you are. Just pieces. I cannot write myself like a book. I cannot read myself like a book. I think I asked too much of you and I wore us down. I am an exhausting person. But that’s okay too. I do not need to worry about how our story ends.
You are a very special medium, and new to me, but you have taught me something. You cannot analyse an unfinished text, like a blog.
Or like a life.
And I miss you, so I’m coming home.
Yours (truly!),
cerebralmum
December 29th, 2007 at 2:17 am
I’m glad you are back.
So very well said. I miss my blog - I need it. At times I have thought about not writing nay more. That maybe if I didn’t write, I would be forced to speak out loud and verbalize things (out loud) better. But that doesn’t work. I come back to writing as the only avenue at times, to voice my struggles.
Glad you are back as well.
December 29th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Great post! It astonishes me also the position blogging has taken in my life. I have felt a variety of emotions towards it, but in the end, I keep coming back.
December 29th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Just “hugs” to both of you…
December 30th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I’ve been a compulsive diary writer since the early eighties - more than twenty-five years - so blogging hasn’t been that new, though i wish i had the competence to exploit the technical side of it better. One of the interesting [and sometimes depressing] things about reading old diaries is finding that I haven’t changed much in the multifariousness of my obsessions, or the multitude of selves expressed. There’s a continuity there which you can almost choose to be frustrated by or sanguine about.
There’s a lot more stream-of-consciousness stuff and personal stuff in my earlier diaries, though. I’m a bit less self-indulgent now, though I miss some of that stuff sometimes. I also got into trouble in my earlier blogging days for writing about people close to me - I hadn’t adjusted to writing in a forum where people might actually read what I wrote. Nowadays, the blogging is more disciplined and dressed up for the public. Still, it has that attractive open-endedness of a diary, which gives it a freshness [which might be illusory, but it seems to work].
Montaigne, who originated the essay, more than 400 years ago, and who beautifully mixed the personal and the public in a casual style, wrote ‘I write not only to discover myself, but to create myself’. I love that.
December 31st, 2007 at 11:46 am
Stweart, you always leave the best comments, things I need to chew over. The continuity of our character is perhaps one of the most surprising things. Without being deterministic, I know that genetic research is showing that as we grow older, the influence of our childhood environment grows dimmer and the things that might be considered highly heritable come to the fore.
As for self-indulgent, I used to use that word so often, to describe so many things. Now I think that stream-of-consciousness is not necessarily one of them. Often one of them, yes, but not necessarily so.